BP report blames itself, others for oil spill

BP take some of the blame for the Gulf oil tragedy in an internal report issued Wednesday, acknowledging among other things that it misinterpret a key pressure test of the well. But in a possible appetizer of its legal strategy, it also pointed the finger at its cohorts on the doomed rig.

The extremely technical, 193-page report attribute the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history and the rig bang that set it off to a complex chain of failure both human and mechanical. A number of of those problems have been made public over the past 4 1/2 months, such as the failure of the blowout preventer to fasten the well shut.

The account is far from the definitive ruling on the cause of the disaster. For one thing, government investigators have not yet begun to fully examine the blowout preventer, which was raised from the base of the sea over Labor Day weekend.Full story